I've always wondered about my love of books.

I've always had a deep and enduring affection for books.

Apart from one incident my mother told me about. I was around 18 months old and was flipping through a "blacks medical dictionary" and apparently it wasn't stimulating enough for me so I attacked it with a brown crayon and scrawled over two pages. Then I sat quietly and continued reading as if nothing had just happened.

Since then my love and appreciation of books has bordered on the obsessive.

I wasn't aware that I had a syndrome and the research for this task has enlightened me to my sickened state.

Thank you SF0 for helping me identify my disability.

"My name is Ben and I suffer from Rashid's Syndrome".

Rashid's syndrome is also known by Fictonecrosis (popularly "bibliophagia").

The country of origin is Saudi Arabia and the first known case was from the tenth century when Hashim al-Rashid, a merchant of Medina, returned from travelling and started to display symptoms.

Fictonecrosis progresses through three stages. I would consider myself a stage two patient.

Stage one- restlessness, irritability and a vague but growing sense of unease.

Stage two- an urge to read that surpassess all other motivations; a crabbed, stooped posture caused by marked forward curvature of the spine and an impulse to smell and taste the leaves and binding of books.

Stage three is a fatal phase of fictonecrosis. The body attempts to compensate for stage two by creating a craving for paper and ink.

Thank you for listening and learning about fictonecrosis. I'm hoping to start a support group and that I don't drift into stage three.